"People who are more scientifically literate, rather than gravitating toward the truth, will simply be more adept at defending their tribe's position, whatever it happens to be... the lesson is that false beliefs, once they've become culturally entrenched--once they've become tribal badges of honor--are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people."

~Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

尋日睇書見到有句我覺得很有意思的文字, 講到教會高層好多時會縱容色魔橫行, 出自Andrew Greeley, review of Spoils of the Kingdom by Anson Shupe, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 37 (March 2008) 142: "The Clerical elite will rally around the accused person because an attack on him is an attack on the whole elite... For the sexual abuser this provides an almost perfect situation. You can exploit, and your colleagues will protect you from the effects of your exploitation either by denying it or finding you another place to exercise your power."

The project of studying New Testament ethics is multiplex; it requires us to engage in four overlapping critical operations that we may designate as the descriptive, the synthetic, the hermeneutical, and the pragmatic tasks... Indeed, much confusion can arise from the failure to distinguish these operations appropriately.

Even if we should succeed, however, in giving some satisfactory synthetic account of the New Testament's ethical content, we will still find ourselves perched on the edge of a daunting abyss: the temporal and cultural distance between ourselves and the text. How can we bridge this chasm? This is the hermeneutical task. How do we appropriate the New Testament's message as a word addressed to us? ......Only historical ignorance or cultural chauvinism could lead us to suppose that no hermeneutical "translation" is necessary for us to understand these texts... How can we preach from these texts anymore? How can we take our moral bearings from a world so different from ours? If the New Testament's teachings are so integrally embedded in the social and symbolic world of first-century communities, can they speak at all to us or for us?......The task of hermeneutical appropriation requires an integrative act of the imagination. This is always so, even for those who would like to deny it... Thus, whenever we appeal to the authority of the New Testament, we are necessarily engagedin metaphor-making, placing our community's life imaginatively within the world articulated by the texts. It is an easy thing to say that such analogical appropriation is necessary; to show how it can be done is a harder task.